Naomie Harris puts the Miss Moneypenny rumours to
bed. Once and for all...

No Eve Moneypenny

17th January 2012

Although little has been revealed about her
Bond Girl role in the upcoming "Skyfall", a lot of talk has been
generated by the casting of Naomie
Harris. Tabloids ran wild
with speculation that the actress would be playing Miss Moneypenny,
but Harris has finally put that story to bed.

Speaking to Live magazine, a supplement of the
Mail on Sunday tabloid that still perpetuates the groundless
claim she will be playing the MI6 secretary, Harris said: "The
idea of me being Moneypenny was a good, racy rumour. But Eve
is not
remotely office-bound. She gets to see plenty of action. That
meant a lot of gun training."

"I’m such a pacifist that I
never thought I’d be excited about guns, but I absolutely
loved it. The weapons training I’d done on Miami
Vice was with real bullets, but this time I was shooting
blanks. I did two hours three times a week for three months,
mostly working with a Walther PPK, a very light, very beautiful,
ladylike gun."

The media will inevitably compare her
to glamorous Bond girls of the past like Ursula
Andress,
Jane Seymour or Halle
Berry. "To be honest, I don’t
think I’d be very good at such a role," she
said. "What drew me to this was the opportunity to
play a new kind of Bond Girl. We are Bond Girls who are
multi-faceted, intelligent and capable," said Naomie
of the roles herself and Bernice Marlohe will play in "Skyfall".

"It’s not just the women who
have changed. James Bond himself has changed and Daniel
Craig has been a very big part of that. He’s brought depth
and humanity to the role. He’s so layered in a way
that other Bonds just weren’t, because nothing seemed
to touch them."

"Daniel’s Bond is
very much touched by his relationships. In 2012, there’s
a need to have female characters who are equal to that. Otherwise
it would be totally imbalanced
and no one would care about the relationships Bond has. I love
the way it’s developed in that way. Those Bond Girls in
the Sixties and Seventies might have been good back then but
they wouldn’t be seen as very PC
now. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that we’re going
for a feminist take on the Bond Girl, because that has so many
connotations to different people. But I would say that we are
Bond Girls who are multi-faceted, intelligent and capable. In
the past, the Bond Girls were all over Bond and didn’t
have a life outside that relationship. That’s not the case
in this film."

Epilogue
Despite Harris categorically stating in the interview that she
will not be playing Moneypenny in the film, one tuned-out sub
editor
at
the Mail still
managed to slip the falsehood into her unrelated travel report
from the Maldives, printed in the same issue of the newspaper.